“A little circle of light.” Was Tolkien alluding to this when he drew our attention to the shinings in that most fragile of “halls” in the dell below Weathertop? Perhaps, and so we might ask if the ending of the chapter that is so menacingly entitled, A Knife in the Dark, is the dyscatastrophe, the inevitable defeat suffered by all heroes. “The great earth, ringed with… the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof, whereon, as a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat.” Champions With Courage as Their Stay. In his wonderful lecture, The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien expresses this with heartbreaking poignancy. The other is the dyscatastrophe, the final defeat suffered by even the greatest hero. The entirely unexpected and yet longed for happy ending that transforms all the suffering that has gone before. One is the eucatastrophe of the fairy tale. In Verlyn Flieger’s wonderful study, The Splintered Light, she begins by reflecting upon two apparently contradictory elements within Tolkien’s mind and in his work. Soon they will attack and a Morgul blade will pierce Frodo’s shoulder yet, as we readers of the tale listen to Aragorn, even if we have read it many times, we are as glad to be lost in it for a moment. For close at hand, five of the Nazgûl, led by their lord, are stealthily approaching the camp. Three shinings on a night of ever present danger.
The travellers are sheltering in a dell below Weathertop and, as well as the shining of Aragorn’s eyes and the sky, aflame with starlight, the moon rises above the hilltop. Above him was a black starry sky.” Aragorn tells the Tale of Tinúviel
His eyes shone and his voice was rich and deep. “As Strider was speaking they watched his strange eager face, dimly lit in the red glow of the wood fire. 184-191Īragorn’s telling of the Tale of Tinúviel is a thing of beauty and draws us in so near that we want to lose ourselves in it as, for a brief moment, are its teller and its four hearers.
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp.
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